Document View

To be an effective corporate leader, it is essential to possess specific leadership qualities and skills beyond industry knowledge and technical and/or clinical skills. So where and how to managers develop effective leadership skills? Truly effective leadership behavior is a process that must be learned.

To be an effective corporate leader, it is essential to possess specific leadership qualities and skills beyond industry knowledge and technical and/or clinical skills. Even the best specialists and "individual performers" are not automatically endowed with strategic relationship and interpersonal skills. So where and how do managers develop effective leadership skills?

Truly effective leadership behaviour is a process that must be learned. Senior people "knowing things" or "being able to do things" is not enough. Developing leaders need to choose to change how they behave, and such changes must be learned and embraced. The "learning leadership" process can often involve an acceptance of new attitudes and styles of communication not always easy transitions to make as they involve fundamental behaviour changes.

To become a successful leader, you must be able to effectively self-evaluate. It is essential to be able to "step out of yourself" on occasion and view your own behaviour with objectivity. This will enable you to make powerful and personal choices about how you relate to the people to whom you provide leadership. It also must be accepted that leader relationships are more than just work relationships. A good leader can provide beneficial tools to his or her staff that transcend the work place and can be used in home and social scenarios. For example, a leader who inspires confidence in the members of a task force can expect that confidence to have positive side-effects on the outside-the-workplace environs of the members of that task force.

The best leaders will work hard to be aware of the world around them cultural shifts in communication and interaction norms, etc. The most aware modern leaders realize that larger cultural and social trends demand transformations at many levels for individuals, teams and whole organizations as they recreate themselves with greater:

* Personal authenticity and collaborative individualism;

* Organizational and personal responsibility, stewardship and autonomy; Consultation and agreement-making;

* Balance of outcome and process focus; and

* Balance of business and community interest.

These multi-level transformations demand more of modern leaders than traditional learning of knowledge and skills. Modern organizational leadership often requires people to change their image of their organizations and their roles within them.

The Difference Between Management and Leadership

In leadership development teams, organizations are rediscovering the distinctions between management and leadership. The fundamental differences between the two are outlined below:

Management maintains a focus on:

* Planning and organizing;

* Controlling and problem solving; and

* Focusing on outcomes.

Leadership maintains a focus on:

* Creating a vision and developing strategies;

* Engaging, motivating and inspiring people;

* Building trust and having courage; and

Creating action.

Many private and public sector organizations challenged with developing management and leadership skills err on their over-dependence on management skills. This is, in a sense, "the road more travelled" because management skills are far easier to achieve because they're based on logical and rational processes.

In short, traditional management development offers a seductive and easy short-term success but it is not achieving leadership development.

Leadership skills development requires real investments into more difficult areas such as relationship skills, personal development and an unending mental flexibility to tolerate extra-rational and emotional human complexities. Leadership skills development is "the road less travelled" for a myriad of reasons, not least being a central realization that it is a never-ending journey with no tidy right or wrong "answers."

Awareness of the need for a balance of both technical (rational) and interpersonal (extra-rationale skills in leadership is growing and gaining influence in Corporate America, but the need for a consistent balance between the two is very much an issue in this new era.

Obstacles to Overcome

Human Resources practitioners involved in designing and facilitating leadership development programs will often notice many would-be-leaders' obstacles to their own development. Such obstacles must be overcome if the "leader-in-training" is to graduate to successful leadership status, The most common obstacles include:

* Learned helplessness and the belief I can't make a difference" or "they won't let me make a difference";

* A need to heal the past and relive resentment for leaders' previously inhumane and unsuccessful actions;

* Paralyzing fear of retribution based on unchallenged organizational mythology; and

* Low self-awareness, emotional maturity and responsibility. These are often evident in chronically poor social skills, relationship skills and the habitual blaming of other for team and organizational ills.

This list is by no means all inclusive, but illustrates the common obstacles that can be best overcome when a better understanding of human behaviour and interpersonal skills is developed.

The issues of self-image, learned helplessness, fear and emotional responsibility are part of human nature and require suitably human nature-oriented developmental solutions. As mentioned above, effective self-evaluation can be the strongest tool to overcoming these obstacles and leading to the important process of re-inventing oneself as a leader.

In other words, knowing leadership theory and having leadership micro-- skills does not "make" a leader. Candidates often satisfy perfectly rational leadership competencies and still fail to lead. This is why traditional information-based (and cognitive) training often fail to deliver behavioural change with regard to leadership.

Learning to be A Leader

An excellent example of an extra-rational process requiring experiential learning is the action of blindly touching your nose. Reach out in front of your face with one hand, close your eyes and gently touch your nose. Now think about how you learned to complete this simple task.

The action is simple and you probably learned it from many repeated events over time. The micro muscle movements and spatial awareness are, however, very complex and you now unconsciously process vast amounts of information to complete this simple task.

Imagine how hard it would be to learn to blindly touch your nose from information other than from experience. This extra-rational process of blindly touching your nose, like leadership, is best learned experientially.

In a 1997 UC Berkeley Study on "Management and Behaviour", established and acknowledged leaders attributed fully a third of their leadership learning and development experiences to anti-models, or "bad examples". Research subjects developed a third of their leadership capabilities by knowing or experiencing poor leaders and vowing to never be like them.

Since the best leaders so often attribute such a large portion of their skills to having "learned the hard way by being around poor leaders in the past", it makes sense that most leaders-in-- training today could learn from that knowledge. In other words, while dealing with your "boss from hell" - regularly work to think about what you are learning - and how you will perform differently when you are in a leadership situation.

While learning from bad examples can be beneficial, it is important to remember not to exclusively focus on the negative. Your "leadership tool kit" will be fully stocked with strong tactics, principles, practices and learned skills only if you also pay close attention to those leaders around you who have set powerful examples of effectiveness.

In his book, "Learning to Lead" (1992 Jossey-Bass), leadership expert and author J. Conger defines four approaches to leadership development as:

1. Conceptual theories;

2. Micro skills-building;

3. Personal growth and self-awareness; and

4. Feedback and learning about your self from others.

All of these concepts involve extra-- rational thought.

In short, and to reiterate the points made earlier in this article, leadership development is not an exclusively rational process. Far from it.

The bottom line in learning to be an effective leader then, is that traditional information or competency training must be enhanced by extra-rational, experiential and personal development processes. No matter how much we crave simple, quantifiable solutions to satisfy the tail-end of the economic rationalist management fad - simple, rational solutions rarely exist. Knowledge of complex human behaviour and extra-rational reasoning is the essential ingredient to being a successful leader.

As growing leaders invest in developing their leadership skills, the most valuable concept to remember is that what they are learning is not the same as teaching people information, knowledge or training technical skills. Learning leadership is far more complex, personal and extra-rational.